Molecular and Cellular Biology

Library Catalog

Subject Specialists!

The quality of your search will depend on you choice of search terms. The more general the term (for example, "birds"), the less precise the results, and the more specific the term ("Northern Flicker", or "Colaptes auratus"), the more precise the results. Precision, though, will result in fewer items returned. Try the most specific first, and then if you need to, try more general ones. Remember to use truncation (sometimes called stemming) and variant spellings so that you won't miss titles that might be important.

Getting Started

The fastest way to find a book is to use UMA WorldCat on the Libraries homepage. Enter your search terms (or author or title) in the search box. The results listed show the resources at UMass Amherst first, followed by those in the Five Colleges. The holdings in the Boston Library Consortium are listed next, and those in libraries worldwide after that. Open the record of the book you are interested in to see its availability. You can request a book in the Five Colleges by using the "Request from Five Colleges" button on the right side of the page. In most cases, you won't need to go beyond UMass and the Five College listings. If there is no UMass listing, you can still get the book through Interlibrary Loan.

Next steps

When you have found a book that seems useful, look at the Subject(s) entries; if you see one that looks good, click that to get other titles that have been given that subject heading. You can add more terms to the search by choosing Modify Search